The use of the internet for commerce has spawned a variety of auctions, marketplaces, and exchanges for trading everything from bandwidth to books. Mechanisms for bidding agents, dynamic pricing, and combinatorial bids are being implemented in support of internet-based auctions, giving rise to new versions of optimization and resource allocation models. This volume, a collection of papers from an IMA "Hot Topics" workshop in internet auctions, includes descriptions of real and proposed auctions, complete with mathematical model formulations, theoretical results, solution approaches, and computational studies. This volume also provides a mathematical programming perspective on open questions in auction theory, and provides a glimpse of the growing area of dynamic pricing.

eTransformation in Governance: New Directions in Government and Politics is about transformation in government and governance due to the information society development. The book provides conceptual clarification of the e-transformation in governance, and presents empirical findings on the recent developments in Western countries. The book provides innovative and fresh views to recent developments and practices of e-governance.

Understand Bitcoin, Blockchains, and Cryptocurrency "Antony helps us all clearly understand the mechanics of bitcoin and blockchain." Rob Findlay, Founder, Next Money #1 Best Seller in Investing Derivatives and Natural Resource Extraction Industry, Futures Trading, Banks & Banking, Energy & Mining, Monetary Policy, and Computers & Technology There's a lot written on cryptocurrency and blockchains. But, for the uninitiated, most of this information can be indecipherable. The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains provides a clear guide to this new currency and the revolutionary technology that powers it. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Gain an understanding of a broad spectrum of Bitcoin topics including the history of Bitcoin, the Bitcoin blockchain, and Bitcoin buying, selling, and mining. Learn how payments are made, and how to put a value on cryptocurrencies and digital tokens. Blockchain technology. What exactly is a blockchain, how does it work, and why is it important? The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains answers these questions and more. Learn about notable blockchain platforms, smart contracts, and other important facets of blockchains and their function in the changing cyber-economy. Things to know before buying cryptocurrencies. Find trustworthy and balanced insights into Bitcoin investing and investing in other cryptocurrency. Discover the risks and mitigations, learn how to identify scams, and understand cryptocurrency exchanges, digital wallets, and regulations. Learn about: Blockchain technology and how it works Workings of the cryptocurrency market Evolution and potential impacts of Bitcoin and blockchains on global businesses You've read books such as Blockchain Bubble or Revolution, Cryptoassets, Blockchain Technology Explained, Blockchain Revolution, The Bitcoin Standard, Mastering Bitcoin, or Bitcoin For Dummies, but to really understand the technology read The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains.

The availability of effective global communication facilities in the last decade has changed the business goals of many manufacturing enterprises. They need to remain competitive by developing products and processes which are specific to individual requirements, completely packaged and manufactured globally. Networks of enterprises are formed to operate across time and space with world-wide distributed functions such as manufacturing, sales, customer support, engineering, quality assurance, supply chain management and so on. Research and technology development need to address architectures, methodologies, models and tools supporting intra- and inter-enterprise operation and management. Throughout the life cycle of products and enterprises there is the requirement to transform information sourced from globally distributed offices and partners into knowledge for decision and action. Building on the success of previous DrrSM conferences (Tokyo 1993, Eindhoven 1996, Fort Worth 1998), the fourth International Conference on Design of Information Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing (DrrSM 2000) aims to: * Establish and manage the dynamics of virtual enterprises, define the information system requirements and develop solutions; * Develop and deploy information management in multi-cultural systems with universal applicability of the proposed architecture and solutions; * Develop enterprise integration architectures, methodologies and information infrastructure support for reconfigurable enterprises; * Explore information transformation into knowledge for decision and action by machine and skilful people; These objectives reflect changes of the business processes due to advancements of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the last couple of years.

This book provides an in-depth comparative analysis of inequality and the stratification of the digital sphere. Grounded in classical sociological theories of inequality, as well as empirical evidence, this book defines 'the digital divide' as the unequal access and utility of internet communications technologies and explores how it has the potential to replicate existing social inequalities, as well as create new forms of stratification. The Digital Divide examines how various demographic and socio-economic factors including income, education, age and gender, as well as infrastructure, products and services affect how the internet is used and accessed. Comprised of six parts, the first section examines theories of the digital divide, and then looks in turn at: Highly developed nations and regions (including the USA, the EU and Japan); Emerging large powers (Brazil, China, India, Russia); Eastern European countries (Estonia, Romania, Serbia); Arab and Middle Eastern nations (Egypt, Iran, Israel); Under-studied areas (East and Central Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa). Providing an interwoven analysis of the international inequalities in internet usage and access, this important work offers a comprehensive approach to studying the digital divide around the globe. It is an important resource for academic and students in sociology, social policy, communication studies, media studies and all those interested in the questions and issues around social inequality.

This book provides a comprehensive review of China's Internet development in the past 23 years since the country's first access to the Internet, especially since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. It offers a systematic account of China's experience in Internet development and governance, and establishes and presents China's Internet Development Index System, covering network infrastructure, information technology, digital economy, e-governance, cyber security, and international cyberspace governance.

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.

The web is central to many human activities and infringes on many others: at home, and at work, including education and research. Links between web sites can be used in information science and social science research as a valuable source of evidence about online phenomena, and about online components of offline phenomena. Given a set of websites, the links between them many reveal interesting patterns of connectedness that could reflect issues of underlying human communication or information value. Link analysis is therefore a valuable tool for information science and social science researchers investigating the web, or other phenomena with an offline component. This book provides methods, guidelines and examples to guide researchers and students through a research project, in addition to reviewing a considerable body of previous work.
- Contains a complete link analysis methodology for information science and social science research.
- A strong online component includes software and instructions to allow complete link analyses (http: //linkanalysis.wlv.ac.uk).
- Case studies include academic, business and commercial search engine applications.
- Practical chapters describe a range of related methods, software and data sources.

This book presents a blueprint for corporate growth in the challenging environment of the first decade of the 21st century. It shows that Streamlining is an approach that leads companies to enable, automate and innovate, to control costs and improve performance in these new conditions. Pioneers like Cisco, Dell, GE, BP and Siemens have shown that it can deliver. This book will show all companies how to achieve results in the next part of their new techology/e-business journey and will be essential for managers.

Over the last decade, a great amount of effort and resources have been invested in the development of Semantic Web Service (SWS) frameworks. Numerous description languages, frameworks, tools, and matchmaking and composition algorithms have been proposed. Nevertheless, when faced with a real-world problem, it is still very hard to decide which of these different approaches to use.

In this book, the editors present an overall overview and comparison of the main current evaluation initiatives for SWS. The presentation is divided into four parts, each referring to one of the evaluation initiatives. Part I covers the long-established first two tracks of the Semantic Service Selection (S3) Contest - the OWL-S matchmaker evaluation and the SAWSDL matchmaker evaluation. Part II introduces the new S3 Jena Geography Dataset (JGD) cross evaluation contest. Part III presents the Semantic Web Service Challenge. Lastly, Part IV reports on the semantic aspects of the Web Service Challenge. The introduction to each part provides an overview of the evaluation initiative and overall results for its latest evaluation workshops. The following chapters in each part, written by the participants, detail their approaches, solutions and lessons learned.This book is aimed at two different types of readers. Researchers on SWS technology receive an overview of existing approaches in SWS with a particular focus on evaluation approaches; potential users of SWS technologies receive a comprehensive summary of the respective strengths and weaknesses of current systems and thus guidance on factors that play a role in evaluation.

"Web Search Engine Research", edited by Dirk Lewandowski, provides an understanding of Web search engines from the unique perspective of Library and Information Science. The book explores a range of topics including retrieval effectiveness, user satisfaction, the evaluation of search interfaces, the impact of search on society, reliability of search results, query log analysis, user guidance in the search process, and the influence of search engine optimization (SEO) on results quality. While research in computer science has mainly focused on technical aspects of search engines, LIS research is centred on users' behaviour when using search engines and how this interaction can be evaluated. LIS research provides a unique perspective in intermediating between the technical aspects, user aspects and their impact on their role in knowledge acquisition. This book is directly relevant to researchers and practitioners in library and information science, computer science, including Web researchers.

Ashley Friedlein's first book, Web Project Management: Delivering Successful Commercial Web Sites, became a bestseller and an essential reference for Web professionals developing new sites. Maintaining and Evolving Successful Commercial Web Sites addresses the realities of successful sites today, namely the notion that maintaining and evolving a site is actually a bigger commitment than launching it. Management wants to maximize returns and obtain reliable performance data, customers demand better service and insist on sites that are more advanced yet easier to use, and the Web site must increasingly be integrated with the entire business even as the amount of information it handles continues to grow.
Maintaining and Evolving Successful Commercial Web Sites focuses more on process, reality, and pragmatism and less on strategic theory. It provides the reader with the knowledge, tools, approaches, and processes to manage key site maintenance and evolution projects, providing answers to the following questions:
*How can I better manage changes and updates to the Web site?
*How can I scale up to allow more contributions to the site and more content and still maintain quality and control?
*What is content management and how do I go about it?
*How do I go about personalization or community building?
*What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and how do I actually do it online?
*How do I measure and report on how well the site is doing?
*How do I avoid information overload?
*How do I maximize the value the site creates?
The book includes case studies to demonstrate candidly how the issues discussed in the book translate into reality.
*Case studies show candidly how the issues discussed translate into reality.
*Describes content management & Customer Relationship Management (CRM) how to go about implementing them.
*Teaches how to measure & report on how well the site is doing, how to avoid information overload, & how to maximize the value the site creates.

As a new generation of technologies, frameworks, concepts and practices for information systems emerge, practitioners, academicians, and researchers are in need of a source where they can go to educate themselves on the latest innovations in this area. ""Semantic Web Information Systems: State-of-the-Art Applications"" establishes value-added knowledge transfer and personal development channels in three distinctive areas: academia, industry, and government. ""Semantic Web Information Systems: State-of-the-Art Applications"" covers new semantic Web-enabled tools for the citizen, learner, organization, and business. Real-world applications toward the development of the knowledge society and semantic Web issues, challenges and implications in each of the IS research streams are included as viable sources for this challenging subject.

The rapid development and expansion of Web-based technologies has vast potential implications for the processes of teaching and learning world-wide. Technological advancements of Web-based applications strike at the base of the education spectrum; however, the scope of experimentation and discussion on this topic has continuously been narrow.

Just like the industrial society of the last century depended on natural resources, today s society depends on information and its exchange.

Semantic Web technologies address the problem of information complexity by providing advanced support for representing and processing distributed information, while peer-to-peer technologies address issues of system complexity by allowing flexible and decentralized information storage and processing. Systems that are based on Semantic Web and peer-to-peer technologies promise to combine the advantages of the two mechanisms. A peer-to-peer style architecture for the Semantic Web will avoid both physical and semantic bottlenecks that limit information and knowledge exchange.

Staab and Stuckenschmidt structured the selected contributions into four parts: Part I, "Data Storage and Access," prepares the semantic foundation, i.e. data modelling and querying in a flexible and yet scalable manner. These foundations allow for dealing with the organization of information at the individual peers. Part II, "Querying the Network," considers the routing of queries, as well as continuous queries and personalized queries under the conditions of the permanently changing topological structure of a peer-to-peer network. Part III, "Semantic Integration," deals with the mapping of heterogeneous data representations. Finally Part IV, "Methodology and Systems," reports experiences from case studies and sample applications.

The overall result is a state-of-the-art description of the potential of Semantic Web and peer-to-peer technologies for information sharing and knowledge management when applied jointly. It serves researchers in academia and industry as an excellent and lasting reference and source of inspiration.

Today’s publishing infrastructure is rapidly changing. As electronic journals, digital libraries, collaboratories, logic servers, and other knowledge infrastructures emerge on the internet, the key aspects of this transformation need to be identified. Here, the author details the implications that this transformation is having on the creation, dissemination and organization of academic knowledge. The author shows that many established publishing principles need to be given up in order to facilitate this transformation. The text provides valuable insights for knowledge managers, designers of internet-based knowledge infrastructures, and professionals in the publishing industry. Researchers will find the scenarios and implications for research processes stimulating and thought-provoking.

The book provides a comprehensive investigation of the performance and problems of the TCP/IP protocol stack, when data is transmitted over GSM, GPRS and UMTS. It gives an introduction to the protocols used for Internet access today, and also the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). The basics of GSM, GPRS and UMTS are given, which are necessary for understanding the main topic, TCP performance over GSM, GPRS and UMTS. We describe at length the problems that TCP has when operating over a mobile radio link, and what has been proposed to remedy these problems. We derive the optimum TCP packet length for maximum data throughput on wireless networks, analytically and by simulation. Results on the throughput and various other parameters of TCP over mobile networks are given. This book gives valuable advice to network operators and application programmers to maximize data throughput, and which protocols, transmission modes, and coding schemes to use and which to avoid.

As virtual reality approaches mainstream consumer use, new research and innovations in the field have impacted how we view and can use this technology across a wide range of industries. Advancements in this technology have led to recent breakthroughs in sound, perception, and visual processing that take virtual reality to new dimensions. As such, research is needed to support the adoption of these new methods and applications. Cases on Immersive Virtual Reality Techniques is an essential reference source that discusses new applications of virtual reality and how they can be integrated with immersive techniques and computer resources. Featuring research on topics such as 3D modeling, cognitive load, and motion cueing, this book is ideally designed for educators, academicians, researchers, and students seeking coverage on the applications of collaborative virtual environments.

What opportunities do digital technologies present? How do developments in digital media support scholarship and teaching yet further social justice? Written by two experts in the field, this accessible book is the first to look at scholarly practice in the digital era and consider how it can connect academics, journalists and activists in ways that foster transformation on issues of social justice. The terra firma of scholarly practice is changing. This book offers both a road map and a vision of what being a scholar can be when reimagined in the digital era to enliven the public good, as it discusses digital innovations in higher education as well as reflecting upon what these mean in an age of austerity. It is ideal for students and academics working in any field of humanities or social sciences with a social justice focus.